The present invention relates to the field of access control and more particularly to access control to prevent fraud in dispensing periodically issued governmental benefits. Importantly, the invention is fully compatable with ordinary debit card telephones already in widespread use for drawing down a credit allocated to a telephone card holder.
Government benefits are periodically dispensed at a plurality of benefit issue stations to citizens who are in need. Examples of such periodically dispensed benefits are food stamps and unemployment benefits. As explained in detail in our copending patent application Ser. No. 07/783,867 filed Oct. 29, 1991, now U.S. Pat. No. 5,224,173, a substantial number of people cheat the taxpayers out of enormous sums of money. In the food stamp program alone, currently distributing food stamps to nearly twenty-five million Americans, we estimate the loss to be between one and two billion dollars per year. The costs of the program are expected to top $22 billion dollars in 1992.
A cheater, Mr. Double Dipper, cheats the system by double dipping, that is, obtaining two or more duly issued social security cards and thus two or more social security numbers. Mr. Double Dipper can obtain the birth certificates and other identification documents of people he knows and use the names and addresses of these people to obtain the unlawfully issued social security cards. Another method is to forge the birth certificates and other documents utilizing a fictitious name but using a particular address of an individual who will vouch for the fact that the fictitious person resides at the particular address. The second duly issued card is then used to obtain a second food stamp card and other government benefits.
In the aforesaid patent application, we teach various techniques for stopping this cheating which employ refined biometric signatures such as fingerprints or voiceprints of those enrolled in the program. Once a person is enrolled in the data processor to receive the government benefit, his fingerprint for example, is recorded therein. When he goes to obtain a second social security and/or food stamp car in the attempt to double dip, his fingerprint is again digitized and is machine matched with his fingerprint already in the data processor, and a definitive positive match stops issuance of a second card. Since the data bank is large, we also teach the use of a coarse biometric index indicative of height, weight, sex and other physical characteristics to greatly reduce the number of refined biometric signatures to be scanned to detect a definitive match indicative of double dipping. Final definitive rejection of an applicant calls for human matching of live facial images of applicants with facial images fetched from a data processor.
While the aforesaid technique is believed to be effective, it would be desirable to provide an alternative method of attaining the aforesaid goals without matching refined biometric signatures in order to save certain labor costs involved in carrying out this method. Also, we wish to issue to each enrollee an ordinary inexpensive magnetic stripe card to enable the enrollee to obtain for example, food stamps, periodically on a monthly or biweekly basis, and at the same time employ this magnetic stripe card to prevent double dipping or other fraud in a simple and inexpensive manner.